K kepler-title
Teachers About Updates
Account Login Classroom Login Create Account
Teachers About Updates
Account Login Classroom Login Create Account
Search Courses Survey of the Western Political Tradition

Survey of the Western Political Tradition

$500.00/year
Survey of the Western Political Tradition
This class is currently archived, but if you're interested in it being taught again, you can express your interest here!
09/07/2020 - 05/14/2021
Full Year
1.0 credits in Government
Grades 11-12

Taught by:

About the course

This course is an introduction to Western political thought. Students will carefully read, analyze, compare, and contrast great books from the Western political canon, including ancient, medieval, and modern works. Being an integrated humanities course, students will read works of history, literature, and philosophy in a liberal arts fashion. Students will learn the historical context and particular concerns of each work, while also analyzing how and to what degree of success the authors answer perennial questions of political and social life.

This 32-week course consists of four eight-week quarters. Students will attend a lecture and have assigned reading and reading questions each week. Students will also attend a weekly 1.5-hour recitation in which we discuss the assigned work using the Socratic method. Each quarter concludes with an exam and a 1,000-word essay.

Course Objectives:

  1. To know and respect select works of the Western political tradition.
  2. To strengthen one's appreciation for our Western intellectual inheritance.
  3. To learn the perennial questions of political life and how each work seeks to answer them.
  4. To prepare for citizenship, political life, and cultural engagement.
  5. To become proficient in the conversational approach to learning.
  6. To cultivate an appetite for learning as a way of life.

Texts: (tentative)

  • Sophocles, Antigone
  • Plato, Republic
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics and Politics
  • Tacitus, Germania
  • Cicero, On Duties
  • Augustine, City of God
  • Aquinas, The Political Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas
  • Luther, Temporal Authority
  • Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. IV, Ch. 20
  • Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, modernized
  • Johannes Althusius, Politica
  • John Locke, Second Treatise
  • Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, Federalist Papers
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • JS Mill, On Liberty
  • John C. Calhoun, Disquisition on Government
  • Selections from Catholic Social Teaching
  • Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism

About the teacher